The Few, the Proud

In
the interview, Gen. Conway muses on the way the tactics and equipment
of the Marines are changing, in response to the unique nature of the
responsibilities they have in Iraq and the evolving nature of their
mission.

One way the Marines are clearly changing is in the
vehicles troops use to patrol in Iraq. "If you look at the table of
equipment that a Marine battalion is operating with right now in Iraq,"
Gen. Conway explains, "it is dramatically different than the table of
equipment the battalion used when it went over the berm in Kuwait in
'03, and it is remarkably heavier. Heavier, particularly in terms of
vehicles. ....these type of things, make us look more like a land army than it does a fast, hard-hitting expeditionary force."

...In short, wars have a tendency to change the culture of the militaries
that fight them. For the Marines, the cultural change they fear most is
losing their connection to the sea while fighting in the desert.

In the midst of all this change, Gen. Conway is worried about preserving the essential character of the Marine Corps,
even as the rest of the world changes around it. As an organization, the Corps
faces one of the most daunting management challenges in the world:
keeping individual Marines highly motivated and getting them to excel
at a difficult, dirty and dangerous job, in the face of low pay and
extreme working conditions. It is critical to preserve this esprit de corps, even while gearing up for new missions for the modern battlefield.

Corporate Trends

What does this have to do with modern corporate organizations? While
the specific conditions are very different - no bullets or humvees are
involved - companies have also been facing a set of discontinuous
shocks in the last few years, and their pace is only increasing. In
many ways, corporate leaders are facing major changes with challenges
similar to the ones facing Gen. Conway, to which they must respond
quickly and effectively, without losing their own organizational
culture and common knowledge.

What do these discontinuities represent? Given
below are five significant challenges facing corporate organizations in
2008 and beyond. None of these are new but their trends are rapidly
accelerating. For a company to survive and compete effectively, it is
imperative that its leaders have a strategy to handle each one.

1. Outsourcing Partnerships:Corporate
outsourcing has been growing rapidly over the last ten years. Initially
it started simply as a way to find talented technical workers quickly
and at low cost.

Recently, though, this trend has been evolving; outsourcing vendors are now seen as strategic partners who participate in the corporate vision of the Enterprise
and share in its successes and failures. Bringing these outsourcing
partners into the fold (especially if they are off-shore) is neither
quick nor easy.

2. Hyper-Informed Consumers:The
average person in the United States and other developed countries
already has unprecedented access to information, more so than at any
other time in history; this access is now spreading across the rest of the world following the proliferation of mobile phones.

Coupled
with a corresponding increase in the willingness and enthusiasm of
users to consume that information - e.g. watching the quarterly
interest rate changes by the Federal Reserve is now a national pastime
in the U.S. - this means that consumers are now exceptionally
well-informed.

Companies must act accordingly; they must either join the online conversation as equal partners (as Cluetrain suggests ), or be left out.

3. True Globalization:
Increasingly, corporations find their talent, their suppliers, and most
importantly, their customers, at an international level and compete for
them with other multi-national conglomerates, both domestically and
abroad. As Thomas L. Friedman's popular book says, the World has become Flat again.

This
change brings a whole new set of challenges with it; only organizations
with a truly international mindset can survive and thrive.

4. Communication and Collaboration across Distributed Teams: With
this new diversity of cultures, geographies and perspectives within the
Enterprise, it is even more critical to get teams to communicate openly
and to embrace a shared vision.

The recent uptrend in the use of Enterprise 2.0 strategies and tools
is a positive development in addressing this need. These tools help to
bridge the gaps; they promote collaborative design and development, and
enable rapid dissemination of information among international teams
spread across geographical boundaries and many different time zones.

The
speed and flexibility with which these distributed organizations can
respond to changes in market conditions, is now a major competitive
differentiator.

5. The Dominance of Search:As
commerce shifts increasingly online, the use of the Internet for
research, analysis and selection of vendors, and for making purchases,
is increasing rapidly. In the future, it is expected to become the
primary way users find information.

This means that if a company does not show up near the top of search
results for the major search engines, then essentially it doesn't exist
for new prospects and even for previous clients. Addressing this
challenge requires a significant change in Marketing philosophy.
Companies can no longer coast on the strength of their brands; they
must continually invest time and energy in refining their Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) strategies.

Conclusion

These five trends go together and strengthen one another; so do the
challenges associated with them. This positive feedback means that the
changes are only going to accelerate in the future.

How is your company addressing these challenges? Add a comment below and let us know!

August 16, 2007

What is the exit strategy for low-traffic Internet Search Engines? This
is a question I've been secretly wondering about for the past few
months as I study the growing number of companies in this popular
category.

No Lack of Contenders

This already-crowded space is getting saturated. My friend Charles Knight of Alt Search Engines keeps a running list of the Top 100 engines; the overall number easily exceeds 1000.

There
is no doubt that as the amount of online content explodes, driven by
easy low-cost publishing and the popularity of social networks, Search
is becoming increasingly important as a strategic solution - both
within an Enterprise for tying together all the Web 2.0 tools, and on
the Internet, for making relevant content accessible.

On
the Internet at large, Search is currently dominated by the 5 top-tier
Search Engines: Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, AOL and Ask. There is also
a second tier of engines that have captured enough buzz that they are
likely to be sustainable for the medium-term: Hakia, Quintura, the
yet-to-be-launched Powerset, and others. There are also specific Market
segments where niche players are likely to thrive - Shopping, Jobs,
Travel, Audio, Video and so on. Apart from these top tier and vertical
segment players - what about all the rest?

Exit Strategy

I fully expected that many of these smaller, innovative search engines would get absorbed by the larger ones for their technology [for example, Microsoft acquired Medstory, and there are ongoing rumors of a simplyHired acquisition by Google]; but recently, a pattern has emerged that suggests a different possible outcome.

Search
has always been a critical feature for large content providers;
conventional wisdom until now for these sites was to implement this
feature in one of two ways: either (i) using a site search widget from
one of the mainstream search engines (as this blog does), or (ii) by
creating a custom search engine based on Google, Yahoo!, Rollyo,
Eurekster or others.

Increasingly however, large content providers want to harness captive search engines to improve the user experience. Here are some of the indicators of this trend:

Yahoo! and AOL
realized this almost from the start. With lots of premium content, they
needed powerful search capability to monetize it well; so in
2004 Yahoo! dumped Google
in favor of its own search technology. AOL leverages Google's search
technology internally, but provides additional branding and UI changes.
[John McKinley of Great Falls Ventures has a great article on the recent Search UI changes at AOL.]

In July, R.H. Donnelley acquired Business.com, a leading business search engine, directory and advertising network. According to the press release, R.H. Donnelley's online properties include Business.com, Work.com and the Business.com Advertising Network.

Conclusion

It's
not difficult to envision a future where every major provider of
content implements a powerful search capability optimized for their
particular set of content. It will be interesting to watch how the
major search engines leverage these capabilities to enhance findabilityand
the user experience. For example, should they continue to directly
index the actual site content, or is it more effective to delegate
search tasks for each of these sites to their particular search
engines, to enhance relevance of search results? More important - does
this trend somehow lead us back towards walled gardens?

----

Alternative vision

Charles
Knight of the Alt Search Engines blog (mentioned above) has been
working tirelessly to promote an alternative vision: to band together a
bunch of alts to create a Universal Interface. This seems the best
strategy for the group as a whole - although they bring to the table
innovative approaches, interesting new user interfaces, visionary
algorithms and specific data sources, the one thing that most
Alternative Search Engines lack is a significant amount of traffic. By
working together towards a common interface, they could improve that
situation. Or a larger company could acquire several of these engines
and put them together, achieving a similar effect.